Tuesday night I attended an event – storagefest II 2012, which was hosted by Valhalla Partners.  The event was a dinner with a group of storage experts from all vectors of the storage industry.  There were customers of storage technologies, VCs with investments in storage, entrepreneurs (folks from storage startups), industry insiders (analysts) and folks from storage companies who have been acquired into large companies.  The goal of the event also had multiple vectors, specific to each "group" that attended.

VCs attend to hear what customers have to say about the state of the storage industry and what they should be investing in or if the storage startups they have invested in are doing the right things.  They also listen to people who have had successful exits and the advice they may have for running a successful storage business.

Customers attend to hear what is new in the storage business and to share their experiences and challenges within their infrastructure, and what they are looking for from their storage technologies and new companies.

Entrepreneurs attend to lend their advice, to see what is new and share ideas.

Industry insiders attend to learn more about customer challenges, who has the best chance at solving these challenges, how the industry is shaping up and to report on the event.

Large company attendees, people who have had successful exits into the large company, are typically in influential roles in their new company and go to learn about how the industry is evolving and what new technologies are out there that they may want to add to the portfolio of the larger company.  It is also a good chance to listen to customers discuss what they are looking for from the next generation of storage technologies.

I set all of that up so you can understand the players and the mix of people at the event.

After dinner and drinks the floor was opened to have a discussion around “Big Data” (the newest “hot topic” in the data storage industry).  The discussion was started with one question – “What is Big Data”?  After 2 hours of debate, from all of the “industry experts” I never once heard the answer.  A majority of the conversation was around the size or volume of capacity that data is consuming these days.  (One analogy even went as far as saying “It’s similar to a ‘big person’ – when a ‘big person’ can’t fit into conventional clothing, they shop at a Big & Tall shop – so ‘Big Data’ is data that doesn’t fit into conventional storage systems.)  I have to say that none of these are right.

So here it is, the definition of Big Data – Big Data is not defined by size or volume.  Big Data is any data.  Big Data is ALL data.  Big Data is structured data.  Big Data is unstructured data. Big Data is semi-structured data.

The tools we have today for analyzing even the smallest amount of data is very sophisticated and it is getting even smarter.  Think about an application that can analyze every bit of data in say a large store such as Target.  It can analyze and cross reference who buys what at what time of the day and in what geographic areas.  The application can then save the results of that data into a location where it can be further analyzed and even more new data is created.  All of this analytics is done so you can create a much more competitive business.  The data, in all of its forms throughout the process has value, and the more value you can extract from the data, the greater the opportunity is to create a more successful business.

About a year ago I listed to an excellent presentation by Jeff Jonas from IBM on Big Data.  One of the points he made was that big data gives you better predictions and bad data is actually good data because it tells you directions not to go which in turn enables you to get to your destination faster.  Our business objective is to squeeze context out of our data.  The funny thing is, context is, by definition, is to better understand something by taking into account the things around it. So in theory the more data you have, the better off you are.

One of the things we also know is that time is of the essence.  People’s willingness to wait for information to make business decisions has gone from running batch jobs on data sets to real-time answers.  We also know that the better the predictions (due to the ability to analyze more data) the faster folks will want the information.  This is “Big Data”.

Next we will talk about Cloud - this is getting interesting

There was a great post a couple of weeks ago, with Tom Coughlin as a contributing editor, on Forbes’ news site about the floods that hit Thailand and how it will affect the disk drive market.  The great thing about the article is it truly highlights that necessity is the mother of invention.  What do I mean by that?  Over the past few “storage efficiency” has been a big topic with vendors.  Helping customers “do more with less”, especially in these stringent economic times, is key to the vitality of a number of businesses.  Technologies such as storage virtualization and thin provisioning have helped customers to slow their storage spend and get better utilization out of their existing storage.  Once customers have moved their utilization rates from 35% to 65% or 70%, time comes when new storage needs to be acquired to keep up with the growth of data.  The issue comes when there are no more disk drives to be acquired.  Due to the floods in Thailand, analysts predict that the storage industry could be 50 to 60 million units shy of the demand this quarter.  This does two things:

1)      Drives the price of disk higher, at a time when the expectation is to spend less for disk

2)      Has IT getting more creative on how they use and deploy their storage

It is the later that I want to focus on as paying more for disk is not necessarily the best option.  It is important to note that data grows for one reason, business does not stop, it needs to keep going and it is what is driving the demand on the data.

In the Forbes piece Tom talks about “a surge in new technologies because of this disk shortage” but he doesn’t cover some of the most innovative technologies that are available to help customers.  I would agree with Tom that we “could” see a surge in SSD but that would be short lived do to both supply and cost as well as a surge in tape, but these aren’t really “new technologies”.

New technologies for primary storage optimization can and will play a key role in helping IT be more productive with their existing capacity.  New technology such as Real-time Compression can help customers get back up to 80% of their existing storage capacity without losing any of their current capabilities or changing any of their data management processes.  The technology seamlessly integrates into your storage environment and compresses your data 50% to 80% (depending upon data type).  It also fits into IT’s existing data management practices without having to change anything.  No change is required to any of the applications, snapshots stay the same, replication stays the same even backup works without having to change anything in the environment.  And while some vendors may say “you can’t deduplicate compressed data”, you actually can deduplicate data written with Real-time Compression.

The Real-time Compression technology is truly a “new” technology that can expect to surge in this environment.  IT can deploy this technology and expect:

1)      Up to 80% compression on their primary storage

1. This means they can defer adding new capacity until the HDD market comes back and disk prices stabilize

2)      See up to 80% optimization in each of their downstream processes that use disk

1. Meaning up to 80% less capacity for snapshots
2. Meaning up to 80% less capacity for replication
3. Meaning up to 80% less capacity for backups

(In each of these cases, each process uses disk so there is a tremendous savings by just compressing the primary copy of the data)

3)      The technology will be transparent to their existing infrastructure

In addition, Real-time Compression can cut your cost per TB by a factor of your compression ratio (50% compression is a 2:1 cost reduction in your $/TB cost).  It is also the case, if you are looking to SSD for performance, you can now afford to spend some money on SSD or more money on SSD given the new cost model.

Now, the “new” technology does need to be efficient and fit into a customer’s existing infrastructure seamlessly or it isn’t really useful.  Asking IT to change their processes can be just as costly as purchasing new capacity in the long run.  I mention this because in a related story, NetApp is also fearful about what the HDD shortage will do for their business.  I find this ironic.  On a recent panel I was on at SNW with Larry Freeman of NetApp, he told the audience that NetApp filers have these “new” technologies “built in” to their WAFL file system, in fact they have 10 “storage efficiency” features built in to WAFL.  He went on to say that on a weekly basis they get reports from a number of systems in the field that “report in” on how customers are using their systems.  On average customers use only 3 of the 10 features.  When we polled the audience to ask them why, they said that while the feature may help them save space, they impact other areas of their operation.  Maybe it impacts system performance, maybe it impacts backup so they can’t use the feature.

The moral of the story is that I do believe that new technologies are going to “surge” (as Tom states) in his piece, because IT will need other alternatives to the shortage of disk drive that are available and the higher prices.  In addition, this will force IT to look at their environment to identify how to be more efficient with their storage environment as stuff like the flood could come up again and affect the supply and demand of HDD.  But the right technologies that not only help with storage capacity as well as data growth needs to be the answer to the challenge.  The best technologies fit into IT’s existing infrastructure and makes it more efficient overall.

As a number of you know, I have been blogging about the merits of Real-time Compression.  It may be of some interest to know that when Ed Walsh, CEO of Storwize, asked me to join and told me the company focused on "compression", I first thought he was joking.  I mean the industry has had compression available for years.  The reality is, there is no other technology like Real-time Compression available from any vendor, and it is today, even more clear, why IBM chose to own this technology.  In the next few blog pieces I plan to talk about a few of the concepts of the IP that make this technology so far advanced than any / all of its competition. Today’s piece is about fixed input versus variable input compression.  This is a very simple concept to understand really.  Traditional compression uses a process called 'fixed input' / 'variable output'.  If we refer to the diagrams below, we start off with the original file on the left and the compressed file on the right.  The way traditional compression works (and you can actually watch this on your home computer if you winzip a file) is the following: The compression algorithm will 'chunk up' the original file into 'manageable' sizes before it compresses the file.  The tradeoff here, and why this process happens, is like with anything in computer science, performance for optimization.  The first diagram shows the large file being 'chunked up', compressed and stuffed into the smaller file.

Figure 1

There are two significant issues with this. The first issue is that the compression dictionary is not shared across multiple ‘chunks’ when compression is taking place.  The example in Figure 2 shows that the letter “F” in ‘chunk’ 1 does not get compressed with the letter “F” in ‘chunk’ 4.  This means that the compression ratio is simply not optimized across the file.

Second is that as a file gets modified, and the compression ratio of the modified ‘chunk’ changes, it will cause fragmentation in the compressed file.  Figure 3 shows ‘chunk’ 3 being updated from “1111” to “1100”.  The newly compressed ‘chunk’ 3 is smaller (referred to as 3’).  As the new compressed ‘chunk’ is added to the end of the file, a “hole” is left in the compressed file.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Best practices documentation from the competitors to Real-time Compression will tell users that if a file is frequently modified, that over time, the compressed file can actually be larger than the original file.  This does not help the storage administrator.

1)      Over time the file system can grow rather than shrink which was the premise for using compression in the first place

2)      The I/O performance on the array will be very taxing

3)      The CPU cycles taken up on the array for compressing and decompressing these files will also be taxing on the array and cause a significant performance impact.

The converse to ‘fixed input’ / ‘variable output’ is ‘variable input’ / ‘fixed output’ and this is how Real-time Compression compresses a file.  I should first note that because Real-time Compression operates as an appliance in NAS environments, in the network, we see the data stream into the array.  By looking at the data stream as it enters the array we have the ability to do some very unique things.  First, we are able to compress “like” data together.  In the case where there are two “F”’s in the same file, we are able to leverage the same compression dictionary and obtain additional compression in the file.  This is what is known as time based compression versus location based compression in the other scenario.  This is how Real-time Compression is actually able to get up to 10% better compression ratios than its competitors.

Figure 4

Figure 5

Having fixed segments in the output file also has added benefit.  First, each segment in the output is the equivalent of 1 I/O.  In an NFS environment the ‘chunk’ is 32KB in a CIFS environment the ‘chunk’ is 60KB.  This means that any read from the file can be done in 1 I/O saving significant I/O resources when accessing a file.  By maintaining an index of these segments (one in the cache of the appliance and a copy in the compressed file) Real-time Compression can eliminate fragmentation of the compressed file.  When a file is modified, the modified compressed ‘chunk’ is flagged by the index that it is available for the next write to come in and the newly compressed ‘chunk’ is added to the end of the file.  When the next modification comes in, the hole that was left by the last modification is now re-used.  This means:

1)      The compression ratio is maximized by looking at a stream of data versus chunking it up

2)      The compression ratio for the compressed files stay the same throughout the life of the file saving IT the space they desperately need

3)      Lowering the I/O on the array helps to maintain / improve performance to the application

4)      Removing the CPU cycles and having the appliance do the work means that the array is not overloaded when trying to do compression

This is just one example of the over 35 patents leveraged in Real-time Compression.  In an age where data growth is the single biggest challenge for IT, this technology has tremendous value to any companies business.  Weather it is trying to reduce storage budget costs, reduce utility expense, have more data on line and available for analytics or reduce footprint on primary storage to product backup savings, this technology has many business benefits.

Stay tuned as I talk about another piece of the Real-time Compression IP.

On October 11, 2011, at Dell World, Dell announced a component to their DX6000G object based storage called an “SCN” or Storage Compression Node.  It is interesting that Dell would mention in their blog post that this is “Dell’s first Ocarina based solution…” What makes this interesting is the value proposition behind Ocarina was its ‘content aware’ deduplication, not necessarily compression.  That said, this blog post seems to be the ONLY information on Dell’s web site about the product and there is very little in the press about this product and the technology.

While it is nice to see that Dell, who has committed to their own storage technology, understanding that storage optimization is important, the reality is they are a little to late to the game.  I say this because the announcement that came from Dell around their 6000 is really bizarre.  First, the solution is an object based solution.  Didn't they learn anything from EMC?  The Centera is not gaining a lot of momentum these days, even if they had a lot of ISV partners.  In fact, it is loosing ground.  Object based storage was good before the whole 'Big Data' thing was the 'next big thing' but today, people need a big clustered file system, that is optimized, that can server not only unstructured based data, but also some structured data that allows you to find stuff quickly.  Also, the DX may be a good solution for data types that are of the media / entertainment only segment, but when it comes to running a business, it takes more than just this object based file structure to be successful.

To me, this solution is too little, too late.  Dell, in order to be a true competitor in the space that is highly scale-able, clustered file systems that are optimized, they need to advance their thinking.   This will be difficult for Dell.  First of all they are not known for technology advancement or integration.  Until they announced thier departure from EMC they didn't really have a major focus on storage and now with their acquisitions, the question is, what is their value prop.  Couple that with the fact that IBM has 1000's of patents in storage and Dell doesn't where does that leave the direction of Dell storage?

When you look at the fact that IBM has industry knowledge and studies that disk can't grow at the rate it did in the late 90's and keep costs low, you need optimization technology to help you maximize disk capacities.  Combine this with the fact that Dell doesn't invent anything but acquires it, and if we take a look at how long it took for Dell to deliver a "compression" product from their acquisition, it leads us to believe that there will be a long time before Dell is ready to be a formidable player in the storage business when it comes to delivering products or technology that move customers past the commodity infrastructure plays to the advanced solutions that deliver capacity at the right price.  If it took over a year for Dell to get the Ocarina stuff to the market in a technology that is really "old school" technology, what are we expecting for the future of Dell storage?

My opinion is Dell will always be the low cost supplier of commodity hardware to risk adverse small businesses.  Integrating next generation technology will not be their forte.

Some interesting data came out of this panel.  There were probably over 150 people in the audience.  It was a well-attended session.  Also, Dave is VERY good about asking the audience questions.  Let me start by making sure we all know where everyone sits at the “storage efficiency table” that was on the panel.

• Larry Freeman is from NetApp – they claim, and I believe them, that they have 10 storage efficiency technologies that are embedded into WAFL
• Craig Nunes main focus on the panel was ‘zero reclamation’ to optimize storage
• I have a Real-time Compression drum I am beating
• Jarred Floyed focuses on data deduplication

Here are some questions and answers Dave got when speaking to the audience:

One last comment too that Larry Freeman stated was that NetApp has 10 storage optimization / efficiency technologies embedded into WAFL.  The interesting thing is that NetApp gets a report from 150,000 systems that "report in" over the weekend and they have collected statistics that users only use 3.2 out of these 10 efficiency technologies on average.

When the question was posed "why" is it that you have technology, that is “free” (more on that later) that can help you better optimize your storage, why they don’t turn it on?  To which the end user response was that they didn't want any change in the infrastructure that could require a change in their processes.  (This means that transparency is another thing that an appliance has to ensure it has.)

I also want to publicly commend Larry for a good deal of his comments and his honesty.  See Larry and I are technologists and sometimes we see the marketing arms of our companies sometimes stretch the truth to get what they want in the market by way of some FUD.  My example is this.  The RtC technology does provide high compression, for the life of the file without performance degradation.  Well, as you can see, this is what customers want give the response from the audience.  However, our friends at NetApp will say “yes, but our compression is free” (like that is supposed to be better).  Anyway, Larry addressed this in the same way I do.  He said that “you don’t get anything for free and there are tradeoffs, specifically in this case around performance”.  Now, I am not saying this to say “see, I told you so” I am saying it because we, as technologists, want to give the user the best answer.  I also admitted that an embedded strategy for technology is the right way to go, IF you can accomplish what the end users’ needs are, performance in this case.

Look, there is a reason why startups exist and why appliances exist.  Storwize didn’t invent compression; they invented a real-time platform that allowed compression to happen in real time.  We do “compression off load”.  We take the work off the array and put it on the appliance – how could that not be faster.  And yes, one day it will be embedded and there will be some other new great optimization technology that will start as an appliance and slowly find its way into the array.  It is the evolution of technology.

At the end of the day, here is what I have to say.  Every end user buys their storage for a reason.  It may be performance; it may be capacity who knows.  What I ask each user to do is to consider their BUSINESS needs for their storage and apply the RIGHT storage optimization technologies for their given environments.  There is not a “one size fits all” approach (this is why NetApp customers don’t choose to turn on all 10 optimization / efficiency technologies) but there are a handful that can help you get the most out of your storage.

What am I saying?  Well, after the Storwize acquisition into IBM, and IBM so graciously took the “Storwize” name and put it on another product,  we needed to come up with a name for our technology and hence the name “Real-time Compression” was born.

Here is the problem.  The name really doesn’t do the technology justice, in a nutshell, it is a bad name.  Not because “Real-time Compression” isn’t important for all of the reasons we have talked about in the past, but because compression is not really a part of the overall IP of the platform.  As I have blogged about before, Real-time Compression use industry standard LZ compression to compress the data.  There is nothing really innovative behind that.  The value in Real-time Compression is really to allow the compression to happen in “real-time”, and that is the true innovation.  Thirty-five patents go into making the half a century old zip technology, actually useful in an enterprise environment.  The ability to perform the 5 essential storage efficiency technologies in real-time is now table stakes for storage optimization.

The issue is, by calling the technology “Real-time Compression” is it leaves the too much to the interpretation of the user and with the name “compression” users tend to ignore the “real-time” part, the valuable part, and only talk about the act of “compression”.  The reason why this is unfortunate is because the market has already set a perceived value for the technology called “compression” at free.  EMC and NetApp talk about having “compression for free”.  Well, as my grandfather used to tell me, Steve, “You always get what you pay for.”  The reality is you can’t do compression in real time with either of their technologies, they cause a huge impact to storage performance, they do not seamlessly integrate with backup and cause more of a headache for backup then they are worth, thereby you don’t get the level of storage efficiency out of their “free compression” technology.

IBM really acquired 35 patents that go into making a real-time platform, and that is the business need that customers have today.  It just so happens that the first “plug-in” to this real time platform was compression.  The original patent set allowed for real-time virus scan, real-time QoS as well as other real-time solutions you would want from your storage.  The reality is if you look at IBM’s 5 essential storage efficiency technologies, you can do them all in real time and IBM is the only ones who can say that.  When you can do storage efficiency in real-time, you become transparent to your existing applications and processes and just make them more efficient without having to change your processes.  This makes storage management and IT much more effective.

A few of the components of the IP that allow the platform to behave in real time are:

• Changing the input and output schema from a fixed to variable schema to a variable to fixed schema
• Performing optimization on a time basis vs. a location basis optimization schema
• Never having to read the data before optimizing the data
• Write grouping – combining data into one I/O for fast effective writes

This is why I say it is unfortunate that we called the technology “Real-time Compression” and lumped it in with the rest of the other “compression” technologies.  We really are a real-time platform that will, over time, have other valuable technologies embedded into it, thereby adding more value to the real-time platform.

The video  below is Dave Vellente from Wikibon and me at VMworld 2011 in the Wikibon Cube talking about the Real-time Platform.

Okay, so I rounded out my trip after leaving Prague to Slovenia and Croatia.  In both locations there was an IBM Storage Forum conference.  In Slovenia, IBM has just moved into a new building this year called Crystal Palace.  It was very beautiful.  The highlights of the Form were Cloud, Big Data and Real-time Compression.  At the IBM Slovenia Form I discussed Real-time Compression.  There were approximately 80 customers and partners at the conference.  They were very enthusiastic about learning about Real-time Compression.  They had all heard about the technology but they wanted to know more.  We talked about how the Real-time Compression technologies core functionality comes from it real-time platform.  The real-time platform is how compression is done in real-time vs. the competition that cannot perform compression in real-time.  The customers and partners saw this as a distinct competitive advantage.One of the most interesting events that I was able to witness this week was kind of reality show for a job.  IBM Slovenia, Ministry of Labour, family and social affairs and Slovenian employment institute got together to host a contest. The contest was to take 15 Slovenian unemployed workers, and give them a challenge.  IBM has just moved into the new premises - Crystal Palace and in June they opened IBM Innovation Center Ljubljana. Candidates competed for are open position of Assistant (to marketing) in IBM Innovation Center (IIC) Ljubljana.The contest was to identify ways to promote and market IIC Ljubljana in the region of southeast Europe.  The contestants came to the IBM office and heard about IBM’s values and to tour the new facility as well as meet some of the employees. The contestants were then given 48 hours to come up with a power point presentation that shows off IBM’s values, the Innovation center inside the new complex and IBM’s commitment to growth in the region.  It was a great contest and they got a number of great presentations.  The winner was Mateja Gorše. I thought this was a great concept and we welcome the new employee to IBM with open arms.

The following day, 9/15/2011 I drove to Umag, Croatia for IBM Form there.  There were well over 300 people at this event and this place is one big party.  The people coming always come in a day early and are there for the open reception that starts the night before.  The rumor is that the Forum used to take place on an island off the southern coast of Croatia.  Because of the distance required to travel to the island folks spent the day traveling the night before the event there was always a great welcome reception.  This was a time to meet and greet the people coming.  Sometimes this event was also treated as a reward to hardworking IT staff at different companies in the region so they got to attend.  The presentations don’t start at normal conference hours, I think the first one started at 11am and they did go to about 5pm, but at about 12:30 after lunch the bar was full.  Don’t get me wrong, there were hundreds of presentations going on and I know mine was well attended, but I will say, the Eastern Europeans have it right.

In Croatia I also did a press conference that talked about IBM’s 100 years of innovation in storage.  You know, it’s pretty impressive that almost 100% of customers (globally), if they were to look around their data center, they would be hard pressed to a piece of storage gear that didn’t have an IBM patent in it.  From the invention of disk, RMAC, to Winchester, to RAID, to virtualization to automated tiering, IBM has done quite a bit in the storage industry and it is only getting stronger.  With IBM’s incredibly strong research and development arm and its financial stability and its ability to develop and acquire technology, they are really unmatched in the storage business.

In my travels, a few key things I learned about Central and Eastern Europe:

1)      The distribution between SAN (block) and NAS (file) is about 80% / 20%.  While they all did say that the mix is slowly changing, it is still heavily block focused.

2)      The sellers (at least the storage sellers) are super smart, more so than in the US.  If you think about though, they have to be, they really need to be able to support themselves.

3)      Translation.  If you really want to do business in Eastern Europe, you really need to make your content very easy to understand and translate.  Make your PPT with more pictures and fewer words.  I don’t know if any of you have seen 7 bullets in ppt translated into Russian, but it gets pretty messy pretty fast.  We could all be a bit more efficient at PPT and be cognizant of our friends across the pond

4)      I am amazed at the fact that the people who live in these countries are so knowledgeable about their history.  It is also important to point out, that knowledge translates directly in to “how” to sell to people in that region.  Which says two things:

1. Don’t think you can just put some “feet on the street” in a country and sell stuff
2. Knowledge is power

It was a fantastic trip to Europe.  I am glad to be home but I am glad I got the experience to also see that part of the world.

Alright, landed safe in Prague and was picked up by one of my colleagues and whisked away to the IBM office.  There we did an interview with Czech writer Martin Noska from Computerworld for IDG in Czech Republic.  The first Noska informed me was that IBM is the number one in storage sales in Czech Republic (just like Poland!).  He also had some very good questions and he with “What are IBM’s biggest challenges in the storage business”?  I had thought about this for a while and I would have to say it is really about marketing our storage “solutions” to the customer base.  IBM is a double edge sword.  IBM is so big and has so many products it becomes difficult to market or message all of our products without inundating all of our customers and confusing them.  If you think about it, IBM has hundreds of thousands of customers and business partners, if not more.  This is one of our strengths.  When customers have needs or requirements we have very good input into our product portfolio, perhaps the best in the business.  Combine this with the fact that IBM has not only storage solutions but technology across the entire stack from servers to networking.  So when it comes to developing the right technology, that solves real customer problems, I would argue that IBM’s portfolio is the best in the business.  IBM takes an extreme amount of care when developing a solution to ensure that it matches the customer requirements based on the changing needs of IT.  Having an integrated portfolio that works well with our ISV partners, VMware for example, allows us to help customers speed their time to ROI and be very competitive in the market place.  The challenge is, how do we properly message our new solutions to our customers, in a timely manner so that they are well aware of new products without giving them too much information such that it just becomes noise?  It is difficult to say the least.

The interview went very well.  There were questions about tape, where we discussed the advantages of IBM’s LFTS technology for more advanced tape usage, we discussed the direction data deduplication will go as well.  Noska’s view was that there hadn’t been any advancement in data deduplication in the last 5 years.  I told him that for secondary storage, backup, that he is right, I also told him that the real advancement to deduplication will come when it is ready for primary storage.  Today deduplication isn’t ready for primary, but it will be soon.

On Monday the 13^th we traveled to visit Avnet.  They are a great IBM partner.  Like most partners they have a very large SMB install base and also like a lot of SMB feedback I have been getting, they are looking for a building block solution that has all of the software features implemented as a part of the stack.  SMB and Enterprise alike are starting to realize that the value in any array is becoming the software stack that makes the hardware, efficient, optimized, flexible, and dynamic.  IT’s job continues to get more and more challenging with developing strategic initiatives for the business to make them more competitive and it is the job of the vendor to make sure these solutions are as optimized and cost effective as possible.

We also visited DHL.  These guys have one of the greatest datacenters I have ever visited.  They are very advanced and push a lot of data.  The do some very strategic logistics for a number of companies in Europe and Asia.  They, like many others have a number of challenges.  Since my blog post about “The 5 Most Interesting things at VMworld” (#4) I heard something very interesting today.  I asked “What is your most challenging storage issue”?  He told me that storage was not is “most difficult” challenge.  Storage efficiency was important to him in order to keep driving down costs for his organization as they deliver a service to the different groups that make up DHL, but his most difficult challenge was with server I/O in his VMware environment.  If you read #4 in my post, regarding Proximal Data, this is exactly the issue the address.  As VM instances grow on the physical servers, the I/O starts to become the big problem.  DHL runs over 4000 instances of VMware and as the business demands more applications and application resources, they are bound by the I/O of the server, which also causes them to WAY over provision their storage for performance reasons.  This is very time consuming, management intensive and expensive.  The combination of a solution like Proximal Data as well as compression can help them optimize their infrastructure to save money and deliver better, more cost effective services to their lines of business.

On the lighter side, I spend the weekend in Prague.  What an amazing city.  The weather was fantastic and I was able to take a lot of great photos.  I walked around Prague Castle, ate some authentic Czech food, visited the memorial for the Czech hockey players that passed in the Russian plane crash and met some pretty interesting people.  You can check out some of my photos of Prague at www.facebook.com/skenniston.  Coincidentally the photo above shows the "Golden Lane" where the Alchemists worked to turn anything they could find into gold in the city of Prague.

After landing in Warsaw, I got into a car with the local sales leader for Poland and we drove to the event location.  It was a 2 hour drive.  First, the roads and the land in Poland reminded me very much of my home time in Maine.  Very scenic and rural but beautiful and peaceful.  We talked storage for 2 hours and I am always festinated at the thirst for knowledge there is when I travel.  It was a great ride followed up by a customer reception and some local Polish brew.

Thursday I spent the day in Sterdyn, Poland for IBM Storage University.  There were 30 customers at the event and it went very very well.  The event was at Palac Ossolinski, today used as an event center but has a very rich history, in fact at one point it was used as a medical facility in WWII.  The photo is of the building where we had the event.  The topics we covered were:

• Storage Efficiency
• EasyTier
• ProtecTIER
• XIV
• Real-time Compression
• V7000

The customers were very interactive and provided a lot of insight to their environments.  Interestingly enough I learned during our customer reception that IBM storage is #1 in Poland with HP second and EMC third.  This is a true testament to the IBM sellers and the customers who use the IBM products every day to drive their business.  I also learned that the data break down in Poland is 90% block, 10% file which I found interesting and would be interested to check back 12 months from today to see how it will be different.

I did learn something very interesting in Poland.  The question was asked “Why XIV”?  What is so special about XIV.  The answer was awesome.  The answer started with 2 questions:

1)      How old is RAID?

2)      How old is your iPhone?

The reality is data growth is out pacing what traditional RAID can handle and data profiles are changing as well.  These combined have driven new technologies like Cleversafe, Cloud Computing, Hadoop and XIV.  Just like the iPhone is a new approach to the smart phone based on new things we know about how these smart phones are being used, we know more about how data and storage is being used.  New ways to deliver capacity and performance are needed in order to keep up with the changing times.  I thought it was a very good answer in terms that make customers think.

Thursday evening I traveled back to Warsaw where I got in a bit late and just went to a local pub, Sketch.  Grabbed a small bite and some local mead and then headed back to the hotel.  I did get to see the local Palace of Culture and Science in the middle of Warsaw, very impressive, built as a gift from Russia to Poland.

I have an early flight to Prague.  I am very excited about this part of the journey as I have always wanted to travel to Prague.  Press meeting right when I land.  Stay tuned.

The first city on my Eastern European trip was Moscow.  I think the traffic here is worse than the 101 in Silicon Valley during the dot com era.  That said, it was a great visit.  I spoke at the Information Infrastructure Conference at the Swissotel convention center in Moscow.  It was the first time I spoke to a group of people with an interpreter.  It was like being at the UN.  The two main topics were Storage Efficiency and Real-time Compression.

I spoke with a few customers and the press and in dealing with the data growth challenges they wanted to know, “When it comes to big data, what is next, is it ‘huge data’”?  Data growth clearly a concern.  Interesting enough though most of the questions, came around my title of “Evangelist”.  One report told me, “if an Evangelist is ‘preaching the word of storage’ then why not just call yourself an Apostle”?  How do you think that would look on an IBM business card: Global Storage Efficiency Apostle?

The next day I did a day of “sales enablement” in the Moscow office.  We discussed mostly how to sell and position Real-time Compression and what is next for the technology.  I was very impressed with the team.  They were very technical and knew quite a bit about Real-time Compression and really wanted to know in more detail how the technology was invented.  This means they are really talking about the technology and the customers are drilling down into the next level of detail.  There are a lot of good opportunities for the technology in Moscow and I look forward to hearing more about the success of Real-time Compression there.

I didn’t have a lot of time to sight see but I did make it to Red Square.  You can actually buy a beer outside in Red Square and walk around.  So I did.  I took a few photos and then as the US was getting going, I had some work calls to attend to.  That evening I spent on the 34^th floor of my hotel having dinner.  It was a great view of Moscow.  I hope to come back.

Next stop, Warsaw Poland.  Stay tuned.